A Special Duty (5 page)

“It was a heartening sight to see a big four-engine Halifax roar down the valley five- or six-hundred feet over the signal fires, drop its load, do a tight turn without troubling to gain height, and come back for its second run. As the plane turned, the navigation lights on the wings seemed almost to brush the hillside.”
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There were too many times though when the supply drop failed and the frustration and disappointment of the reception group was also felt by the crews, who had flown for hours, only to arrive at the drop zone and find no visibility, no signal fires, or the wrong letter of the day flashed to them from the ground. Sometimes the reception group lit dummy fires to divert enemy attention from the actual drop zone and the crew would need to be briefed not only on the correct signals, but also the dummies, which they would need to identify while controlling a low-level approach amidst shrouded mountain peaks. One of the most common medical problems suffered by pilots was visual fatigue, which is not surprising considering the level of concentration demanded of them, almost always in poor light.
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The reception groups themselves were not always well organized as they waited furtively on the ground, exposing themselves to danger by lighting fires, only to then hear the heavy drone of the aircraft circling above a dense cloud bank. Sometimes the aircraft would fly on to a secondary target and then return to the original one for another try, only to find that the fires had burned out and the partisans had given up, thinking the aircraft had gone. Enemy spotter planes were always on the lookout for the scorched earth of burned-out signal fires, which added to the danger for the reception group and encouraged the location of dropping grounds to be as remote and inaccessible as possible. A DNCO
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in the logbook meant a failed operation, but that belied the effort and skill that a crew had put into the sortie, and, as they debriefed and headed for bed, the ground crew would get busy unloading the containers and bundles to prepare another aircraft for the next attempt. Each month a ‘league table’ would highlight success- or failure-rates for each crew, along with tables of tonnage dropped to each area and a breakdown of the reasons for failure – weather, mechanical, lack of signals, etc., all of which increased the pressure on the exhausted crews – nobody wanted to fail. These are fairly typical signals from the field:

“GUNLESS GASLESS FOODLESS WHY THIS DELAY – STOP – HURRY”
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“THIS IS TERRIBLE – STOP – ONE THOUSAND MEN WITHOUT AMMO HAVE WAITED THREE WEEKS FOR A DROP”
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And the tetchy messages that went back displayed little sympathy:

“APPARENTLY YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF SORTIE POSITION. YOU ARE ONE OF MANY MISSIONS ON IMPORTANT TARGETS AND WEATHER BETWEEN AERODROME AND YOU IS BAD. PROPORTION SORTIES YOU VERY HIGH. UP TO YOU MAKE ‘TEMPO’ UNDERSTAND THIS.
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Supply drops were a lifeline for Mission personnel, not only bringing arms, food and clothing, but letters from home and news of the outside world. The SPILLWAY Mission in Albania, waiting at a cold drop zone with their restive pack mules, desperately needed food, winter clothes and ammunition, but most of all they wanted the letters, newspapers and books from home that they knew would be in No.1 container. Brigadier Davies later recalled that the priority following a drop was to retrieve the precious No.1 container, drag it over to a mule, load it and take it straight to the mess hut before it could be mislaid or stolen. Invariably the catches and hinges would have been damaged during the drop and so someone in the mess hut would hack at it with hammer and chisel to get at the longed-for letters from home.
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Theft from the containers and bundles was a very real problem because villagers in the vicinity of a drop zone soon learned to spot the signs of preparation for aircraft reception and made their way to the area in the dark, helping themselves to the contents of stray containers, which could be scattered over a wide area. The most highly prized was the bullion container, which the resourceful local folk soon learned to identify, leading Mission staff in Greece to start taking bright Aldis lamps to the reception area, switching them on after a drop to deter pilferers. A typical load for a Halifax on a supply run would be fifteen pre-packed containers for arms, ammunition and explosives, nine of which were stored in the fuselage bomb bay and three beneath each wing. These were released by the bomb-aimer to descend on parachutes, plus in the aircraft fuselage were an additional twenty to thirty packages and bundles given free drop, and around 230lbs of leaflets. These would be stacked to a considerable height in the fuselage and moved to either side of the dropping hatch by the despatcher during the flight. The despatcher, assisted by the wireless operator, worked in complete darkness to ensure that no light escaped through the bomb bay, and he would watch for a green light on his display board. This was the signal to push out the packages as fast as possible. A red light on his board would tell him to stop and, if any packages were left, the aircraft would do further runs until all the supplies had been dropped.

The rear gunner, in his cramped turret at the back of the aircraft would watch the packages as they left the aircraft to make sure they were dropping on the target. The strenuous nature of moving the large weight of stores, coupled with a lack of oxygen if the aircraft was flying above 10,000ft to avoid bad weather, imposed quite a strain on the despatchers’ lungs, and the Squadron’s medical officer was sufficiently concerned about the conditions that he flew on a sortie as second despatcher to see for himself what it entailed. He found the work exhausting and went on to recommend that despatchers should be rested whenever possible and spare aircrew brought in to relieve them.
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In the early days, the crew had no idea what was in the containers and packages, but later they were alerted to very dangerous or valuable items, which could then be packed in such a way that they could be isolated if it became necessary to jettison the load. Bomb aimer, Eddie Elkington-Smith remembered bullion containers always going on number three bomb bay, and he could then be sure to keep that one with the aircraft, though Walter remembered an occasion when they jettisoned their entire load in the Adriatic, unaware of the contents. On returning to base they were told that they had jettisoned a container of bullion. The general rule for aircraft in trouble was not to jettison the load if they had been airborne for more than three hours, but anything less than that was at the pilot’s discretion.

For the returning aircrews, there was little in the way of comfort at the Tocra base with persistent winter rain turning the camp into a sea of mud. The trench Tom and his crew had dug around their tent proved inadequate and the first real downpour washed their belongings out into the mud. Walter Davis described their next trench as resembling a “fenland dyke.” It kept the rain out of the tent but also caught the occasional airman weaving his way back from the nearby Sergeants’ mess to his own tent.
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One or two resourceful airmen had replaced their sand floors with concrete to try and make life tolerable but it wasn’t long before the commanding officer, who attributed the scrounging of building materials to: “bad habits picked up in the desert”, put up stern notices forbidding it. The airmen continued to occupy the tents, but the mess was now a permanent building and Nissen huts were erected for operational use, with officers moved to an empty fort nearby. The poor sanitary conditions were slowly being improved, thanks to an NCO sanitation squad, and a fumigator was made available in the sick quarters so that airmen could: “have their blankets fumigated, on request, daily after 1400 hrs”.
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Desert sores, skin infections stomach upsets and visual fatigue were the commonest medical conditions during this last quarter of 1943, but morale was surprisingly good considering the number of casualties and the number of aircraft written off.
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Tom and his crew had a narrow escape on the night of the 15
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December during a leaflet drop for the Political Warfare Executive, when a burst of flak came up through the clouds from the north-west end of Crete and made six or seven holes in the aircraft. The crew found it somewhat galling to come under fire from the ground for the sake of leaflets, but propaganda was part of the war effort and it was the despatcher’s job to make sure that the correct language batch went out at each location.

Some credit for the morale of the Squadron must go the social committee, led by Flying Officer Guest, who worked hard to organize concerts, whist drives, films and seasonal events. Christmas plans were certainly gathering pace and, at a meeting in the airmen’s mess, it was agreed that lunch would take place in the central hall followed by buffet dinners at every section’s canteen. Meanwhile, the mobile cinema was proving so popular that there were now two showings a day and, even then, demand could not always be met. For crews grounded by the weather there were long hours to kill, and during December a number of football matches took place, cooks versus electricians, or squadron versus maintenance crews. The airmen were just one part of the team of men working at the base. Meals had to be prepared, containers and bundles packed, aircraft maintained, supplies brought in, intelligence gathered and communications maintained. Flight crews, however, were on the front line, and when an aircraft failed to return, everybody felt it.

The Storey crew had not been flying on the night of 10
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December, but were woken up by the sound of exploding ammunition from Halifax BB344 (‘Fortune’s Coleen’), which was engulfed in flames on the runway. The catalogue of disasters for Cyril Fortune and his crew that night began during the flight when, midway between changing places with the second pilot, violent turbulence flipped the aircraft upside down and dropped it 5,000ft before Fortune was able to regain control. Then, as they came in to land, the aircraft swung and ploughed into a parked spitfire, bursting into flames. Patrick Stradling, a member of Fortune’s crew, was instrumental in saving their lives that night and, a few months later, when Stradling was missing and his fate unknown, Cyril Fortune wrote a wonderfully heartening letter to his parents to say that there was a very good chance he was safe and adding: “He was always a member of my crew and on one occasion he helped, with two others, to save us all from a very nasty situation, and for that I always felt proud and grateful”.
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Halifax JN888 (Rita) taken at Tocra, December 1943

Poor weather conditions kept all Squadron aircraft grounded in the days leading up to Christmas and this gave the crews a well-earned break from flying. One of the Storey crew took a photograph of Halifax JN888, in which Tom and the crew had completed twenty-four sorties. Tom, with his floppy, curly hair looks out of the open window above a beautifully painted unicorn on the fuselage and the name ‘RITA’ on the nose, along with a star for every sortie flown. It was Walter, the crew’s wireless operator, who had created this masterpiece, making his own stencil so that he could add a star for every operation, and although personalization of aircraft was discouraged, it was often overlooked in the interests of crew morale. Before flying out to Libya Tom had been living with his new wife, Rita, at the family run Unicorn Hotel in Ludlow, and the bold artwork must have given him heart on the long walk out to his aircraft, before climbing into the cockpit to begin his pre-flight checks.

Halifax JN888, ‘Rita’, with her prancing unicorn artwork, only had seven months of flying left. She crashed in the Pyrenees on the 13
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July, 1944 while supplying French Resistance fighters, and was just four miles from the drop zone; her crew having flown her over 600 miles by dead reckoning. Pilot Officer Leslie Peers of the Royal Canadian Air Force and his crew died at the scene. The Mayor of the nearby village of Nistos wrote in 1945:

“The seven occupants of the plane were killed instantly. A shepherd found them on the 15
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July. At once a large group of inhabitants of Nistos went to the scene and there buried the seven heroes. They dug seven graves side-by-side and buried the heroes in beds of fern. It was impossible to take coffins there because the place was two-and-a-half hours walk away amongst precipitous mountains, and moreover this country was occupied by the enemy. We erected a wooden fence round their small cemetery and a cross, also of wood, bears the inscription
: To the memory of our heroic allies, who died for France.
Their graves will not be left untended.”
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In stark contrast to the story of this crash is the loss of Halifax HR674 on the night of 19/20 October 1943. SAPLING 7 was a personnel and supply drop to the Albanian Mission of Major Jerry Fields. Flight Lieutenant Forester knew the Albanian drop zones well and had, just a few days earlier, taken Brigadier ‘Trotsky’ Davies’s SPILLWAY Mission into the Chermenika mountains, noting on his crew’s map of the drop zone: ‘Climb quickly, left-handed, or else’.
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On that fateful night the reception party lit the signal fires only to hear the “scream of the engines”
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as the Halifax came in low and crashed into the mountainside, killing all on board, including two men destined to join the Mission. The terrible phrase: “scream of the engines” describes all too graphically the desperate efforts of the pilot as he uses maximum thrust to try and prevent the inevitable. When Field went down to bury the dead, the Albanian partisans, for whom the supplies were intended, “proved more interested in looting and grumbling that their material was lost and would not help to dig the graves”. Field was helped in this task by a group of Italian soldiers and two old men. He was very disillusioned at the waste of British life on behalf of the Albanians who did not appreciate the sacrifice, and he never got over it. In a report in 1943 he wrote: “Hate the country and hate the people. We will of course continue to do our best, but if there is any excuse for another type of work and evacuation from here, we should jump at it.”
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